Kiss of the Fur Queen

Each of the six sections of the text is named after a tempo marking: a movement or direction that a composer or director of Western classical music provides to the orchestra. These titles highlight the centrality of music in the plot and describe the pace of the narrative in the section. Part 1 is named “Allegro ma non troppo,” or “fast, but not overly so.” This mirrors the movement of the Okimasis brothers’ early childhood, which goes by almost too quickly. Thus, the text introduces a note of caution into the proceedings, urging time not to speed by because of what lies in store.

The opening chapters of the text immerse readers in the life of the Manitoba Cree people living in postcolonial northern Canada in the 1950s. Highway uses rich descriptions to make this universe—so rarely touched upon in English-language literature—come alive for his audience. The descriptions of Abraham’s race towards the finish line in Chapter 1 and his journey homewards in Chapter 2 are both set in a wintry landscape where snow is as essential a feature as the earth elsewhere. The very opening sentence describes the air as so dry “the snow creaked underfoot” (3), while Abraham’s course is “one hundred and fifty miles of low-treed tundra, ice-covered lakes, all blanketed with at least two feet of snow” (4). The novel establishes the Cree as a people still connected with land and lake, unlike city dwellers who may exist in a world more removed from nature.

The Fur Queen is an actual young woman—Julie Pembroke—who appears wearing a “white satin sash but with a floor length cape fashioned from the fur of arctic fox, white as day” (9). By casting a white woman dressed in white as a figure of great relevance in the lives of the Okimasis family, the text reclaims the color white from a Western-centric perspective. The Fur Queen’s whiteness also symbolizes the fact that the new culture the Cree brothers will develop will incorporate influences from different parts of the world, as is true of most people in an increasingly globalized world order.

While the Fur Queen is a real person, the novel also links her to Weesageechak, or the Trickster, a spirit of enormous importance bridging the world of God (or the Great Spirit) and humans. The Fur Queen as Weesageechak is not a symbol or an allegory but a reality as literal as Julie Pembroke as the Fur Queen. The text presents reality as perceived by the Cree; magic and realism are not sealed off from each other. That is why, when Abraham has a vision of the Fur Queen flying upwards and a silver fetus dropping from her crown, an actual silver baby begins to tumble to Earth. The silver fetus following Abraham home is a nod to the Cree concept that children choose their parents. The idyllic world of the Okimasis family is also populated by figures like Jane Kaka, Annie Moostoos, and Kookoos Cook, who add color, chaos, and joy to the narrative. Their constant presence through the novel underscores the importance of community to the Okimasis clan.

Significantly, the first rupture in this happiness comes in the form of Father Bouchard, who disapproves of people dancing on a Sunday. Dance, which is a primary component of the cosmology, rituals, and celebrations of not just the Cree but most Indigenous people, is looked down upon by puritanical strains of Christianity. Christianity’s interference further emerges when Father Bouchard changes the melodious name Ooneemeetoo to a more formal—and alien—name, Gabriel, despite the protestations of the baby’s godmother, Annie Moostoos.

Champion’s flight to the Christian residential school epitomizes the movement from Indigenous heritage to forced assimilation into Western culture, and it is akin to him being torn from the womb-like safety of the family unit. Abraham tells a protesting Mariesis that Champion has to leave because of “Sooni-eye-gimow’s orders […] the law” (40). While Father Bouchard claims sending Indigenous children to Christian schools is a government order, history shows the mandate ended in 1947. Thus, Father Bouchard uses Abraham’s naivete to send Champion away. The image of an Abraham so bound by organized religion is a far cry from his introduction as a proud, independent caribou hunter and racer, showing that colonialist forces have forced Abraham into an unnatural role.